Kamala Harris’ Crusade Against ‘Revenge Porn’

The San Francisco office of California’s Department of Justice occupies a 14-story tower amid what might be the most formidable density of high-tech money and power in the world. The top floor looks across to Twitter’s headquarters, just five blocks away; Facebook is 30 miles down the peninsula in Silicon Valley; and Google not far beyond that.

On the afternoon of February 4, 2015, executives from those companies, as well as Microsoft and other online giants, filed through the building’s doors and into a distinctly unglamorous, windowless below-ground room. They sat in rows. The companies there had made hundreds of billions of dollars collectively during the freewheeling internet boom of the aughts and 2010s, and they weren’t accustomed to being summoned by local law enforcement. If anything, politicians were usually eager to catch a bit of their reflected glamour. President Barack Obama had dined with high-tech CEOs and invited industry leaders to the White House for advice; Hillary Clinton, then preparing her 2016 White House bid, was making speeches in Silicon Valley.

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But as the internet had become a central part of American life, and as social media exploded as a force, concerns were growing that something was going uncontrollably wrong. Just months earlier, a hacker breaking into iCloud had stolen and published the private photographs of a sweeping collection of female celebrities, including the actresses Gabrielle Union, Kirsten Dunst and Jennifer Lawrence. Lawrence, the 24-year-old “Hunger Games” star, called the experience a “sex crime.” And while those stars could afford lawyers and PR experts to fight such a violation, there were uncounted women, and some men, who struggled to reel back horrifying photos of themselves once posted online.

Alongside the tech executives in that room sat lawyers for victims and experts on online harassment. At the head of the group was the person who had brought them all here: the state attorney general, a career public prosecutor named Kamala Harris.

Harris had built much of her career looking out for victims of exploitation, whether that was child abuse or sex trafficking. She had been looking into so-called “revenge porn” for months. And now, as a prosecutor with the full power of California’s legal infrastructure behind her, she had a plan to change the way this online crime was policed. Observers tended to focus on the malicious hackers who broke into accounts and posted them on big national platforms. But Harris had begun to see the real issue as the platforms themselves.

The meeting was closed to the press, and no transcript has been released. But the message was clear, says Danielle Citron, a University of Maryland law professor who was present: This was a serious crime, and it needed to be stopped.

Harris made the point that this had nothing to do with love affairs gone wrong, and it wasn’t online mischief. It wasn’t even about sex, really. It was a crime, the way domestic abuse was a crime. Said Harris, as Citron remembers it, People do it to torment people. They do it to make money. And to call it pornography is to misunderstand the problem, because there’s no consent, It’s “cyber exploitation,” and let me tell you how it ruins lives.

To Citron, who had been working for years to push this exact issue into the public conversation, it felt like a watershed. She draws a parallel to domestic violence and workplace harassment, serious offenses that were once seen more lightly and largely ignored. Here was the self-described “top cop” in all of California — the country’s biggest state and the geographical center of the global tech industry — making the decision that these were crimes, and uniquely devastating crimes. This meeting was a shot across Silicon Valley’s bow.

Harris didn’t threaten to prosecute the companies, or even flex the considerable muscles she had as AG, but there’s no question the message got through. The next month, Twitter banned nonconsensual intimate photos and videos from its service. That summer, Google began stripping explicit photos from its search results at victims’ request. Next, Microsoft said it would block links to intimate content on its Xbox Live gaming service.

“I cannot emphasize enough how leaders in technology have stepped up,” said Harris during a news conference on cyber exploitation in October of that same year. “I’m not suggesting any of them were happy to get a call from the AG saying, ‘Come in, we want to talk with you.‘ But they all did. They did.”

Harris won a U.S. Senate seat the next year, and launched her presidential campaign last weekend with a rally in Oakland.

But all has not been kumbaya with the tech industry. Harris didn’t go after Facebook or Google directly, but she did launch two high-profile prosecutions for online sexual exploitation, and her aggressive legal tactics—peeling away the legal protections that insulate online platforms from the content they host—have gotten her sideways with many people in her state’s most important industry. Mike Masnick, who writes the influential blog Techdirt and has emerged as a critic, worries that Harris’ approach threatens to destroy an online ecosystem that, despite its problems, has produced a flourishing of ideas and tools and human connections. “It’s something of a populist position,” he says of Harris’ legal push, “but I fear where that populist position ends up undermining the internet as we know and love it.” (Harris, through a spokesperson, declined repeated requests for an interview.)

Harris through the years. | Flickr, AP, Getty Images

Now, with the downside of technology again at the center of the national conversation, Harris is almost uniquely positioned among the presidential candidates to understand some of the thorniest issues that face the country on this front, and how government might tackle them. But in the Senate she has been largely quiet. When Congress took up an internet-policing bill closely connected to her own legal work, she barely played a role, and in fact initially refused to sign on.

Why is she sitting it out? Harris has burst quickly onto the national stage; she currently polls behind only Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders among Democrats as a likely challenger to Donald Trump in 2020. Her legal fight against online harassment is one of her most innovative, and least-understood, contributions to public policy. But it’s also potentially toxic with important Democratic constituencies. Harris, by all accounts, is unfazed by such concerns. In her inaugural address as attorney general of California, in 2011, she quoted someone who’d also once held that job: Earl Warren, who later became chief justice of the United States. Said Harris with a laugh, “Everything I did in my life that was worthwhile I caught hell for.”

***

At 54, Harris is a member of the exact cohort of Americans whose careers grew alongside the Internet itself. The year she graduated from Howard University, in 1986, her college yearbook reported that personal computers were becoming a campus “mainstay,” though one professor warned students to save their $3,000 unless they really had a need for one. Howard at the time was linked to five other historically black colleges on a small network; the professor running the project expressed his aspiration to one day connect it to ARPANET, the Defense Department network that within a few years would evolve into what we know as the Internet.

As Harris moved up the legal ladder — a law degree at the University of California’s Hastings College of the Law in San Francisco; jobs with the Alameda County district attorney and the San Francisco city attorney — the Internet was growing, too. With it came a spirited debate over what laws should apply to this new realm of civic activity. With the rise of the web, more people began to shift their lives online, and thinkers and philosophers began to stake out this new territory as a special place requiring special protections. In 1996, one of the foundational texts of that debate arrived on the scene: techno-libertarian thinker John Perry Barlow’s “The Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace,” which would quickly go what would later be called viral:

“Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind,” it began. “On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty where we gather.”

As sententious as the wording was (in an interview, Barlow would later tell me that he was drunk when he wrote it), it was responding to a very concrete concern. The day Barlow released it, President Bill Clinton signed the Telecommunications Act into law — an attempt both to boost the commercial potential of the nascent internet and to tame it. Buried in the Telecommunications Act was a bill called the Communications Decency Act, which made it a federal crime to use the internet to spread “patently offensive” sexual or otherwise graphic content, or push obscene content to minors. Its supporters said this was only necessary to protect children from the excesses of this new medium. (Its champion, Nebraska Democrat James Exon, said on the Senate floor: “The information superhighway should not become a red-light district.”) Barlow and its opponents were horrified: It was as though in this important new digital landscape, the Constitution’s free-speech protections suddenly didn’t apply.

In the years to follow, Barlow and his ilk were ascendant. The Supreme Court struck down major parts of the Communications Decency Act on First Amendment grounds, and other courts did away with much of the rest. It was the techno-libertarians, not the techno-skeptics, who would set the tone for a more freewheeling conception of online life — one that would come to be a bigger sector of the economy than even they might have imagined.

Harris pursued a sprawling set of cases as a public prosecutor in the 1990s and 2000s, from homicides to drug dealing to crimes targeting LGBT people, and developed a reputation as a tough lawyer. “As a career prosecutor,” Harris wrote in her 2010 book Smart on Crime, “I believe that nothing is more important than how we choose to keep ourselves, our families, and each other safe.” In speeches about her inspiration, she quotes civil rights leaders like Cesar Chavez and Fannie Lou Hamer. “My sister, Maya, and I joke we grew up surrounded by a bunch of adults who spent full time marching and shouting about this thing called justice,” she has said more than once.

Much of her work as a prosecutor had little to do with technology. But by the time she ran for attorney general of California in 2010, it had become clear that the internet was not just a commercial bonanza, but also a hyper-efficient mechanism for personal harm, whether by allowing online harassment, or facilitating the easy buying, selling and renting of women, girls, and occasionally men. She won the election; among the challengers she beat was Facebook’s former top lawyer. And it was clear that tech was now in her sights. When she delivered her inaugural remarks on the steps of a Sacramento History Museum, it wasn’t much more than a hundred words into the speech that she promised to protect Californians from “online predators.”

Harris’ focus on technology was fairly novel. It was only three years earlier that Steve Jobs, by then Apple’s CEO, had stood on stage at downtown San Francisco’s Moscone Center to announce the first iPhone, saying what with hindsight was justifiable bravado, “Apple is going to reinvent the phone.” When Harris took office, law enforcement across the country was still struggling to figure out how this ubiquitous new version of the online world would change their jobs. “We quickly realized that everyone who was arrested was arrested with a smartphone. It didn’t matter what the crime was,” says Travis LeBlanc, then a special assistant attorney general and senior adviser to Harris.

But while the technology was new, say those close to Harris, the new state attorney general realized the crimes it enabled were old and familiar ones. In 2012, Harris issued a 134-page report called “The State of Human Trafficking in California,” and the role of technology figured prominently. Harris has called trafficking “modern day slavery,” and in the report she said that the internet was making it worse, with perpetrators now using social media, online marketplaces, and other digital tools to both find and sell victims, often anonymously. The situation, wrote Harris, was “atrocious.”

Harris was uniquely poised to do something about it. She had a sprawling department of more than 4,000 workers and a budget of over $800 million, and she had a powerful legal tool in California’s Constitution, which, unlike the U.S. Constitution, includes an explicit right to privacy.

When it came to technology, she took a multiprong approach, and one that often roamed far afield from the courtroom. She engaged in what she likes to call “convenings” with tech companies, in sessions like the 2015 basement meeting. She pushed for legislation to expand local officials’ ability to prosecute cybercrimes in which either victim or perpetrators lived outside their home district. If that approach to the job sounds exhausting, her staff agrees: “She wants to solve every single problem out there, the world’s biggest problems,” LeBlanc told me. “And there are obviously only 24 hours in a day. She’s only one person. Her staff are [each] only one person.”

In trying to push Silicon Valley firms to change their behavior, Harris borrowed from a civil-rights tactic called “interest convergence theory,” which holds that advocates make progress when they can show how their causes align with the self-interest of those in power. Tech companies should want to make their websites and platforms safer, her argument went, because people who feel unsafe will leave them. That hurts corporate bottom lines.

If that appeal to self-interest failed, she made it clear she was also willing to play a more traditional game: “I’m very well aware that I have a carrot and a stick,” Harris has said. “I prefer to start with the carrot. But I’m also prepared to use the stick.”

As Harris’ push gained momentum, she began triggering criticism that she was running roughshod over some fundamental rights, including free speech. One case involved a bill she’d sponsored just before taking office as attorney general, when she was San Francisco’s district attorney. Harris pushed to ban registered sex offenders from using any social media sites. Though the idea might have seemed like a smart way to stop online predators, it’s also of questionable legality. “It’s the type of thing that might get you some votes, but that will also get you a constitutional challenge,” says Chris Hoofnagle, a professor of internet law at the University of California at Berkeley. The bill did not pass. (The U.S. Supreme Court would in 2017 strike down a similar North Carolina ban; Justice Anthony Kennedy, a civil-libertarian voice on the court, said the state was wrong to cut off access to “perhaps the most powerful mechanisms available to a private citizen today to make his or her voice heard.”)

Those around Harris say that Harris knew she was walking a fine line on cyber-exploitation, but thought it one worth walking. As Citron, the Maryland law professor puts it, Harris wanted to answer the question: “How do you address this problem without letting anti-porn lunatics take over?”

***

On October 7, 2016, an airplane arrived from Amsterdam at George Bush Intercontinental Airport in Houston. Onboard was an executive named Carl Ferrer, the CEO of Backpage.com, an online martketplace for everything from used cars to odd jobs to strippers, a business said to be worth more than a half-billion dollars. Waiting for Ferrer when he landed was a team of local law enforcement agents, who arrested him on a warrant issued by Harris in California.

One of Harris’ biggest internet victories was the takedown of the online classified site Backpage.com. Second from left, Backpage CEO Carl Ferrer is pictured; second from right, UGotPosted creator Kevin Bollaert, another Harris target, is pictured. | AP, Wikimedia Commons

Backpage was by far the biggest internet fish Kamala Harris had gone after. The arrest warrant alleged that Ferrer oversaw the posting of paidads for prostitutes, including minors. Working with Texas authorities, she also had Backpage’s Dallas offices raided. The case would turn out to be something of an embarrassment in legal terms. But it was a huge political win for Harris, and it embodied exactly the mix of political ambition and legal risk-taking that makes people in the tech world nervous about her.

By that time, Harris had already notched one major win in her campaign against internet harassment. In 2013, she had arrested a 27-year-old San Diego resident named Kevin Bollaert who ran a website called UGotPosted. Its business model was as vicious as it was simple: It solicited nude photos along with the personal details — name, address, Facebook profile — of the people in them. The photos had often been stolen, or taken in secret and posted without consent. Once Bollaert posted the photos and details, often triggering a barrage of phone and online harassment of the women in the pictures, Bollaert would then charge victims to have them removed.

Bollaert’s defense was that his site was a neutral platform, and he had no legal liability for what people posted there. It was a defense based on Section 230, a piece of federal law that had survived, orphanlike, from when the courts scuttled most of the 1996 Communications Decency Act. Section 230 limited the liability of so-called online intermediaries, declaring that “no provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider.” In the 20-plus years since, this one passage of the law had become a linchpin of internet freedom, and a rallying point for the techno-libertarians whose thinking dominated Silicon Valley. At the highest level, it protected Facebook, Twitter and others from being held responsible for illegal content their users posted. At the lowest, it protected operators like Bollaert the same way. Bollaert argued that his nude-photo platform and his take-down service, a sister company called ChangeMyReputation.com, which purported to be a straightforward online reputation-management service, were protected because his was an open platform.

“Is it illegal to host a website where bad things happen?,” asked Bollaert’s attorney in her closing argument. “Is it illegal to hold up a big blank canvas to anyone who wants to paint it?”

In one sense, Harris’ case simply ignored the “internet” part of Bollaert’s internet operation and treated his behavior as real-world crimes; her office charged him with both extortion and identity theft. But many also saw it as a direct attempt to weaken a law that was protecting a huge and important industry. Harris and her team argued that it was clear that Bollaert’s site wasn’t like Facebook or Twitter, open platforms where users decide what to post. Bollaert, instead, was a publisher. One legal analyst who worked on the case attempted to upload to UGotPosted a photo of her cat, named Shiloh. The cat photo was rejected, which the prosecutors said was proof Bollaert was actively managing the site with the goal of exploiting real people.

A jury agreed, and Bollaert was found guilty and sentenced to 18 years in prison. In a press statement on the day of his conviction, Harris declared it a landmark in holding bad actors accountable, even online. “Sitting behind a computer, committing what is essentially a cowardly and criminal act, will not shield predators from the law or jail,” she said. Bollaert appealed, but the court found that by requiring identifying details on victims before they were posted, Bollaert was actively engaged in posting the offending content, and was thus not protected by Section 230. Harris had scored the country’s first major revenge porn conviction — and it wasn’t lost on advocates that she had done it by whittling down the definition of a protected site.

The Backpage case she prosecuted in 2016 was much bigger, and Harris tried to take it one step further. An online classified site, Backpage had been launched in 2004 by the owners of the country’s largest chain of alternative newsweeklies as a way to tap into the digital ad revolution triggered by Craigslist. It became known for its “adult” section, which critics said was a hub for illegal prostitution — some of it nonconsensual — and human trafficking, including that of minors. Law enforcement officials had been watching Backpage from the start, and had been trying, with little success, to get Backpage taken down. Backpage wasn’t simply an online classified site, they believed: It functioned as an online brothel, with the full knowledge of its operators.

Backpage, however, had largely operated with the protection of Section 230. Its owners argued that they were running a legitimate classified ad platform and weren’t liable for how people chose to use that ad space.

Harris decided to come at them head-on. After a three-year investigation by her office, Harris had Ferrer arrested on charges of pimping and pandering. Harris herself was given play-by-play updates during the dramatic arrest and raid in Texas, according to her staff. Ferrer was extradited to California and jailed. The prosecutors’ request for a warrant argued that it was “obvious” that ads on the Backpage site were for illegal prostitution and trafficking, and that Ferrer and other company stakeholders, who were also charged, were knowingly profiting from those postings. “The Communications Decency Act was not meant to a shield from criminal prosecution for perpetrators of online brothels,” said Harris. Her de facto chief of staff at the time, Venus Johnson, put it more bluntly in a recent interview: “It was a long time coming,” she said.

That wasn’t how Backpage’s lawyers saw it. “Frankly outrageous,” one of Backpage’s attorneys called Harris’ theory of the prosecution. He pointed to a 2013 letter to Congress by 49 attorneys general of U.S. states and territories — including Harris — which argued that Section 230 needed to be amended to allow state officials to prosecute sex trafficking crimes. In other words, she knew full well that Section 230 didn’t allow her to press this case. This wasn’t the Bollaert case, Ferrer’s lawyers argued. Ferrer had taken a hands-off approach to the site, and thus was inarguably legally protected.

There was one other important fact about the arrest: It occurred just weeks before the November 2016 election, in which Harris was running for U.S. Senate.

The dramatic arrest was widely covered not only in California newspapers, but by USA Today, NPR, CNN, the New York Times, and scores of other publications. Harris featured prominently in the coverage. Backpage’s general counsel, in a press statement, called Ferrer’s arrest and the office raid “an election-year stunt, not a good faith action by law enforcement.” In a statement released to the public as they asked a judge to drop the charges, Backpage shareholders Michael Lacey and James Larkin, who were charged alongside Ferrer, added a few digs of their own: “Make no mistake; Kamala Harris has won all that she was looking to win when she had us arrested,” they said. “Like Sheriff [Joe] Arpaio, she issued her sanctimonious public statement, controlled her media cycle and got her ‘perp walk’ on the evening news.”

On the legal front, at least, the court agreed with Backpage. On December 9, 2016, a Superior Court judge threw out Harris’ case on Section 230 grounds. “Any rational mind would concur that the selling of minors for the purpose of sex is particularly horrifying,” wrote Superior Court Judge Michael Bowman. But, said the judge, the government’s hands were tied by free speech and the law of the internet: “Congress has spoken on this matter and it is for Congress, not this Court to revisit.” Harris, in a statement, called herself “extremely disappointed” by Bowman’s ruling.

LeBlanc, Harris’ one-time senior adviser, who by then had moved to a job back in Washington running a bureau of the Federal Communications Commission, called it “an innovative lawsuit.” Added LeBlanc, “when you do something that hasn’t been done before, there’s some risk that you take.”

By that time, however, there wasn’t much risk for Harris herself: She had easily won the Senate seat in a 25-point victory over rival Loretta Sanchez. Harris refiled an amended set of charges and left for Washington. The California Department of Justice stayed focused on Backpage, and the next California attorney general, former congressman Xavier Becerra, would keep up the pursuit, focusing on the more technical complaint that Backpage’s operators had committed bank fraud by disguising the true origins of their revenue from payment processors skittish about working with the site. In April 2018, Ferrer pled guilty to state and federal counts of money laundering and conspiracy. Federal authorities, pursuing their own charges, seized the site and Backpage shut its doors.

At some level, Harris’ prosecution worked. Her aggressive approach had opened the door to the case that eventually took down the site. And to her supporters who saw her crusade as long overdue, it was a win — however tortured the road. To the tech world, however, it was clear that Harris was willing to steamroll the legal protections the industry considered, and still considers, central to its business model. “Her position was perfectly clear,” says Eric Goldman, professor at Santa Clara University’s law school, and head of its institute of technology. “She was doing everything in her power to undermine Backpage, and she was willing to sacrifice Section 230 to do it.”

***

When Harris took her seat in the Senate, she became arguably one of the most tech-savvy members of a body sorely lacking in digital know-how. But she hasn’t made technology her key issue in Washington, and if anything has shied away from the topic.

“It’s something of a populist position,” Harris critic Mike Masnick says about her legal push, “but I fear where that populist position ends up undermining the Internet as we know and love it.” | Getty Images

In the fall of 2017, she and Sen. Amy Klobuchar, a Minnesota Democrat, and Sen. Richard Burr, a North Carolina Republican, introduced a bill that would criminalize the knowing distribution of revenge porn, but it never attracted a single Senate co-sponsor beyond the original three. She did pose questions to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg in his April 2018 Senate hearing, and COO Sheryl Sandberg that September, but otherwise hasn’t been a high-profile player in the debates over Facebook’s privacy violations.

Her most notable absence came on the issue closest to her own record. In the spring of 2018, Congress debated and passed a bill that would change how Section 230 applies to sex-trafficking cases, freeing state and federal officials alike to bring prosecutions. The federal measure was targeted at Backpage, but would also apply more widely to online operators. Silicon Valley dug in against it, with Google calling it a “disaster”: making online platforms more liable for sex-trafficking content would lower their incentive to police for it, the company argued. In September 2017, New York Times writer Nicholas Kristof published an industry-shaming column called “Google and Sex Traffickers Like Backpage.com.” After winning some wording changes and once its passage looked inevitable, mainstream tech companies later dropped their opposition to the bill.

The issue would normally be squarely in Harris’ wheelhouse, but she played no public role in either drafting or advancing the bill. In fact, she was not among its original 25 backers in the Senate, and initially balked at signing the bill at all, though she eventually added her name to the measure three months after it was introduced. Those close to her say she and her staff worried that the bill was so vaguely written that companies, unsure how to comply with it, would simply stop attempting to clean up their platforms.

Did Harris’ White House ambitions lead her to back off? If history is any guide, political figures can get eviscerated when they’re seen as cracking down on free speech: In the 1980s, Tipper Gore was vilified by critics for pushing for parental advisory labels. And in the mid-2000s Hillary Clinton was hotly criticized for attempting to impose restrictions on violent video games. Said Clinton at the time, “We need to treat violent video games the way we treat tobacco, alcohol, and pornography.”

Harris’ aggressive record on online exploitation could pose a problem with two core Democratic constituencies: civil libertarians, who serve as an ideological validator inside the party, and the tech industry, which has served as a cultural one — not to mention the major fundraising power of Silicon Valley.

Evan Engstrom is the executive director of Engine, a California-based policy advocacy group representing small tech companies. He worked closely with Harris’ Senate office on the sex-trafficking bill, which his group opposed. “Obviously there was a lot of skepticism going in because of the positions she took as AG,” says Engstrom. “Her reputation wasn’t all that great. But I can say with enthusiasm that they were responsive, engaged and thoughtful.”

Still, Harris hasn’t appeased all critics. Says Techdirt’s Mike Masnick, “in a lot of circles, she’s certainly looked upon as being friendly to tech, of having a close relationship with tech, and I wish that were more true.”

Goldman, the Santa Clara professor, says that we’re already beginning to see the negative repercussions of a chipping away of free speech online in a way that diminishes the online world. Craigslist has taken down its own adult section. Tumblr now bans “adult content,” including depictions of genitalia and sex acts. And Patreon, a platform for artists and other creators to connect with supporters, has banned from its platform fundraising for the production of legal pornographic material. Says Goldman, “One way to think about it is the Internet has shrunk a bit. The boundaries have moved in.”

As a candidate for president, Harris would benefit greatly for having tech show up big for her, not just merely see her as acceptable. Harris could likely use the U.S. tech industry’s financial largess. She’s been a government lawyer all her life — the only client she’s ever had, she has said, has been the people of California; her top salary as attorney general was $157,000, less than some of her staff earned. Silicon Valley has become a major stop on Democrats’ fundraising circuit, the way Hollywood once was. During her 2016 run, she took in a bit of tech money — some $214,000 from the internet industry, per the Center for Responsive Politics, which tracks campaign fundraising. But she raised far more from the television, movie and music industries that have long been critical of the internet, to the tune of nearly a million dollars.

LeBlanc, the former California special assistant attorney general, now a lawyer in private practice in Washington, D.C., says that Harris isn’t blind to possible tensions with the tech industry, and their effect on what’s next for her in politics. She’s just not distracted by them. “Every elected official in any state is concerned about where their major industries are on issues,” says LeBlanc, “but I think she follows her own moral compass.”

What remains today for Harris is a reputation on tech that is largely in the eye of the beholder. Harris is, at once, a tech-savvy law enforcement official who looked the internet’s dark side squarely in the eye, a single-minded tough-on-crime type who cared little about her effect on digital world, a circumspect state official who ultimately did not go hard enough on her home state’s biggest tech corporations, a creative regulator who came up with nuanced solutions to high-tech problems, or—depending on the case, legal question or even day—some blend of all those.

“She was in the heart of Silicon Valley and she didn’t take no nonsense,” says Danielle Citron, the law professor. “I think her preference is, ‘It’s good for business, but let’s figure out how it’s good for society.’ I don’t think she’s cowed by anybody.”

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